As an increasing number of applications and services are being made available over networks such as the Internet, an increasing number of content, application, and/or service providers are turning to technologies such as cloud computing. Cloud computing, in general, is an approach to providing access to electronic resources through services, such as Web services, where the hardware and/or software used to support those services is dynamically scalable to meet the needs of the services at any given time. A user or customer typically will rent, lease, or otherwise pay for access to resources through the cloud, and thus does not have to purchase and maintain the hardware and/or software to provide access to these resources.
While aspects of various applications and resources can be adjusted and managed in the cloud, the data repositories upon which these applications and resources rely are not similarly adjustable or easily managed by a customer or other such user. Typically, performing tasks such as provisioning and scaling data storage are tedious manual procedures, in which a customer has to provide a database administrator (DBA) or similar expert user with configuration information and requirements, such that the DBA can determine whether the configuration is valid. Further, there is no easy way for a customer to dynamically and/or automatically adjust the parameters for a database instance or manage other such aspects of a data repository. In many cases, a data instance will have backup and recovery mechanisms in place, but these mechanisms often are in a single location or area such that they are susceptible to failure or outages in that area. Further, when a data instance fails, it typically takes a few minutes to generate a new instance, attach the appropriate volumes to the new instance, and otherwise perform tasks necessary to recover from the failure.